Dear Maintainer,

This is not a new problem, but after all these years I figured maybe
I should finally report it: I think updates to Texlive are larger than
they should.  This is probably not completely specific to Texlive but
that's where I see it in the most glaring way since some of its packages
are the largest .deb packages I have.

Let's take the example of `texlive-lang-french`: the last two `.deb`
packages I have for it in /var (I'm tracking Debian testing) are around
80MB each.

But if I use `xdelta` on their respective (uncompressed) `data.tar`
I get an 11MB result, there's a clear potential to reduce the needed
download size by a factor 7x in this case (and potentially disk space).

For the `texlive-fonts-extra` monster, the xdelta is 20MB while the
`.deb` are 500MB, a reduction by a factor 24x.

[ The above two comparisons are between 2022.20230122-4 and
  2023.20230613-2.  ]

Clearly, taking advantage of this will require changes to the Debian
infrastructure, so is outside of the scope of the Texlive team itself,
but I hope you'll know where to redirect this "bug" report.

And in the mean time: thank you for your work, of course,


        Stefan "dreaming of Debian updates as efficient as
                `git fetch` :-)"

On 16.10.2023 17:28, Stefan Monnier wrote:

Hi Stefan,

You are not the first one, who complains and (probably) not the last
one. Due to the limited man power in the team, we simply copy the
packaging scheme given by TeX Live upstream and this is what you see
here. So unfortunately there is nothing, which will be done from our
side. I try to have as less as uploads as possible, which do not bring
in new upstream features or bug fixes.

I'm aware of an idea called debdelta[1], maybe it is helpful for you.

H.

[1] http://debdelta.debian.net/

Indeed, I think the "fix" should probably be in the generic Debian
infrastructure rather than in any specific (set of) packages.

At most, the package maintainers might need to activate a special flag
telling that delta-encoding this package should be done by default.

Oh, that's indeed very interesting.  I hadn't heard of it yet.
It's very close to what I was thinking Debian should do.
And now I wonder why this is not better integrated into Debian so it's
used by default for packages like `texlive-fonts-extra`.
It could reduce the bandwidth load on Debian servers and even
potentially reduce the disk space used as well (if some .deb are deleted
in favor of deltas).


        Stefan